Podcasts
Podcasts and other audio produced by Comparative Media Studies/Writing and its friends around MIT.
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Podcast: Helen Elaine Lee, “Pomegranate”
Helen Elaine Lee reads from the manuscript of her novel, Pomegranate, about a recovering addict who is getting out of prison and trying to stay clean, regain custody of her children, and choose life.
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Podcast: Nick Montfort, “Poet/Programmers, Artist/Programmers, and Scholar/Programmers: What and Who Are They?”
Nick Montfort is Professor of Digital Media at Comparative Media Studies/Writing. He develops computational poetry and art and has participated in dozens of literary and academic collaborations.
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Podcast: Christopher Weaver, “Amplius Ludo, Beyond the Horizon”
Weaver, founder of Bethesda Softworks, discusses how games work and why they are such potent tools in areas as disparate as military simulation, childhood education, and medicine.
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Podcast: Haidee Wasson, “Do-it Yourself Cinema: Portable Film Projectors as Media History”
Haidee Wasson explores the long and vibrant place of portable film devices in the history of small media, repositioning the “movie theatre” as the singular or even central figuration of film presentation and viewing.
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Podcast: Civic Arts Series, “Thumbs Type and Swipe” featuring DIS’s Lauren Boyle
DIS enlists leading artists and thinkers to expand the reach of key conversations bubbling up through contemporary art, culture, philosophy, and technology, with the aim to inspire, inform and mobilize a generation around the urgent issues facing us today and tomorrow.
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Podcast: Sohail Daulatzai, “The Battle of Algiers as Ghost Archive: Specters of a Muslim International”
Sohail Daulatzai on The Battle of Algiers’ “competing narratives, a battleground over the meaning and memory of decolonization and Western power, and a site for challenging the current imperial consensus.”
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Video, podcast, and summary: An Evening with Comedienne Cameron Esposito
As part of MIT’s Communications Forum, a short comedy set with Cameron Esposito followed by Q&A about Rape Jokes, her standup comedy special about sexual assault from a survivor’s perspective.
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Podcast: Jaroslav Švelch, “Gaming the Iron Curtain: Computer Games in Communist Czechoslovakia as Entertainment and Activism”
The idiosyncratic and surprising ways computer hobbyists in Czechoslovakia challenged the power of the oppressive political regime and harnessed early microcomputer technology for both entertainment and activism.
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Podcast, Stuart Cunningham and David Craig: “Social Media Entertainment”
Media scholars Stuart Cunningham and David Craig propose challenging, revisionist accounts of the political economy of digital media, the precarious status of creative labor and media management, and the possibilities of progressive cultural politics in commercializing environments.
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Video and podcast: Dispatches From the Golden Age of Audio
Cynthia Graber and Al Letson on how podcasting struggles to create gold standards for building shows that will be popular and financially sustainable.
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Podcast: Nick-Brie Guarriello, “The Good Stuff”: The Intersections of Work, Leisure, and Relational Bonding on Tumblr and Patreon
Nick-Brie Guarriello on the political economies and labor demands of micro-celebrity and Influencer culture across social media platforms regarding the Pokémon GO community.
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Podcast, Caren Kaplan: “Bringing the War Home” – Visual Aftermaths and Domestic Disturbances in the Era of Modern Warfare
Caren Kaplan focuses on a period that includes the Vietnam War (1955-1975) and extends into the “War on Terror” through a consideration of Martha Rosler’s photo collage series “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home” (1967-2004).
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Podcast: Roderick Hart, “The Language of Civic Life: Past to Present”
The University of Texas’ Roderick Hart argues that disagreements – endless, raucous disagreements – draw citizens in, or at least enough of them to sustain civic hope.
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Video and podcast, Civic Arts Series: Myron Dewey, “Protecting the Water in Solidarity and Unity”
Myron Dewey has pioneered the blending of citizen monitoring, documentary filmmaking, and social networking in the cause of environment, social justice and indigenous people’s rights.
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Video and podcast: The Consequences of America’s Miracle Machine
Eric Lander, Maria Zuber, and Communications Forum director Seth Mnookin discuss innovation ethics and the real, and sometimes devastating, effects of invention without culpability.
